Re: format date

On Tuesday, April 16, 2002, at 01:35 PM, Alex wrote:

I just started with php and am trying to display a query result for a date field as mm/dd/yyyy instead of mysql's yyyy-mm-dd. I looked through some books and found the use of DATE_FORMAT to covert the dates. Is there any other way to format the date? Thanks My script looks like this: $month_1 = ($date_month_1); $day_1 = ($date_day_1); $year_1 = ($date_year_1); $month_2 = ($date_month_2); $day_2 = ($date_day_2); $year_2 = ($date_year_2); $query = "SELECT * FROM tablename where date >= '$year_1-month_1-$day_1-' AND date <= '$year_2-$month_2-$day_2'";

As a recent convert from my own custom date-formatting techniques (can you believe I was storing my dates in VARCHAR(14) columns?) to the standards of MySQL's DATE_FORMAT function, I can't really recommend this approach. Why not just take your variables and format them into a single string? It'll be much, much simpler once you get used to it // your date data in variables: $month_1 = ($date_month_1); $day_1 = ($date_day_1); $year_1 = ($date_year_1); $month_2 = ($date_month_2); $day_2 = ($date_day_2); $year_2 = ($date_year_2); // create a timestamp representing the date data $timestamp_1 = mktime(0, 0, 0, $month_1, $day_1, $year_1); $timestamp_2 = mktime(0, 0, 0, $month_2, $day_2, $year_2); // format the timestamps into the format preferred by MySQL's // DATE column type $timestamp_1 = date('Ymd', $timestamp_1); $timestamp_2 = date('Ymd', $timestamp_2); // your new and improved, and much cleaner query $query = "SELECT *

            FROM   tablename
            WHERE  date >= '$timestamp_1'
            AND    date <= '$timestamp_2'
           ";

It may seem like more work, but it's much neater, and you have these portable timestamps that can always be reformatted to whatever format you like for display. (Also, be sure to use either DATE_FORMAT or UNIX_TIMESTAMP in MySQL queries to pull the data out in a desired format! Much better than running string functions on the date result after the fact.) Erik ---- Erik Price Web Developer Temp Media Lab, H.H. Brown pricee@hhbrown.com